Accountability and ethics: reconsidering the relationships

Judgments of Responsibility Versus Accountability

We proposed and found that employees’ judgments of responsibility and accountability are distinct but positively related constructs. Using attribution theory for responsibility judgments and lay dispositionalism for accountability judgments, we hypothesized that employees hold others more responsible (i.e., causal) and accountable (i.e., punishable) than they hold themselves for the same workplace mistakes. Independent mean differences within a sample of 286 working adults revealed that people held others more responsible but not more accountable than they held themselves. Post hoc analyses revealed a counterintuitive finding. Counter to what theory would predict, as workplace mistake seriousness increased the variation between self-judgement and other-judgment decreased. Implications and future directions for accountability research are discussed.